Parenity Brand Startup Journal | Entry #8 | Week Ending Aug.16/24

Parenity is a solopreneur brand (read about it here) being built from the ground up by me, Rob Bond. For other entries in this startup journal, check out the startup journal category on this site, or if you want to just check out the previous post, you can find it here.

And if you don’t feel like reading every single thought, here’s the blog post condensed into a short video:

Attack of the Time Gobblers

Things will gobble up your time if you let them. Some examples of things that have tried to chomp away at my days lately are: the frame rate issues I had on entry #7 of this journal, overly elaborate credit card signup gauntlets, local and cloud storage limit issues, device connectivity, a site or app that is glitching at the wrong time, video edits that creep longer and longer. You have to decide which ones are worth the time, which just aren’t, and how to work around the rest. All I can say is don’t be stubborn. Defer or cut loose as many as you can! Remember the 80/20 rule and don’t waste any of your precious time!

Going bi-weekly or monthly on the startup journals

One thing that’s become clear to me is that I need to move these startup journal entries from weekly to monthly. This way I don’t have a weekly time block taken up by editing. If I was a charismatic Vince Vaughn type who could just ramble off the top of his head endlessly and have the end product be watchable and enjoyable with minimal editing, I could save a lot of time. Unfortunately that’s not who I am. Going monthly will also let me boil down the topics to just the most noteworthy.

We Got our ACK Letter

The piece of the puzzle I’ve been waiting on finally arrived. Our letter of acknowledgement has been received from Health Canada, and this will let us start selling an initial small “trial” batch while we wait on our official NPN from them, which is still 6MO or so away.

Drink Powder Production Starts Soon

After wrestling with trying to squeeze all necessary information into the available label space we have on our Adulting Done Bright jars, I threw in the towel and told our manufacturers to have their design team handle it. The font sizes required by Health Canada just do not work when trying to fit French and English versions of all warnings, instructions, and ingredient listings on a small label. I predict the design team over there is going to just reduce the font size, but better they take this creative license than me since they have all the industry experience and know where any wiggle room ends.

Label trouble aside, our deposit on our initial order is in as of today, so we should start seeing our product arrive in the warehouse in about 8 weeks. I decided not to do up sample-sized versions of the product (for influencers and local distribution) because this was going to come with its own order minimums, so I’m instead going to handle filling, labelling and mailing these as needed .

Battery Production Underway

We’ve approved the design of our AA and AAA batteries that we’ll be selling as cross-sell items in our Shopify store. I love them, and I love how they’re packaged, and the sourcing agency I used has been great to work with so far. I’ve paid the deposit on the order, and they should ship to our 3PL warehouse in a month or two.

3PL Locked In

It turns out that the 3PL company I was very sure I was going to use has a $1K/mo minimum. This is not outlandish, but for our first year, I want Parenity running LEAN! I cannot accept profit margins being gobbled up by minimums I’m not yet able to meet. So I’ve decided to work with one of the first companies I looked into, who have no monthly minimums and no minimum contract length, but slighly higher storage fees. I figure if Parenity gets big enough, we can likely negotiate these anyway; and at that point the little extra fees probably won’t even matter to me. I feel good about this decision. I spoke with the president of the company last week, and he seems like he cares, understands, and knows his stuff.

Direct Mail Trial Campaign

The biggest part of my efforts to keep performance marketing spends to a minimum in our first year, is going to be around influencer marketing using social snowball. But I wanted to try an additional method at the same time: direct mail. I may not have even thought of doing this, but I’ve been hearing about ecommerce direct mail platforms like PostPilot for a while now, and it really does make sense. To start, I’m going to just do a small targeted postcard campaign within Canada through a local direct mail company and see how it goes. Who knows; if I end up wanting to really scale this, I may end up on PostPilot eventually. This also gives me a chance to send some work to my designer acquaintance, which didn’t materialize for the Adulting Done Bright Labels.